She asked for time and resources. Gold made another rumbling sound; one, she thought, if very much louder, might have attracted females of his persuasion. Moving that ponderous head to the side for a one-eyed view of the Fijian wonder (he’d heard all of that without interest), Isobel thought he might very well have smiled. She’d heard him called the Moose, and even once someone referred to Mel Gold as an ancient elk. She could not have known then, but now there was no mistaking it: he was no elk, ancient or otherwise. The elk, Isobel knew, was a herd animal. The bull moose walked alone.
He gave her a week and a barely adequate budget, assured her that she would get no other help, and declared himself a fool for fools and children.
“I need to report directly to you,” she said. “Otherwise this will get killed.”
It did not wash. “You give whatever you get to Macmillan. If he doesn’t think you’ve got anything, that’s what you’ve got.”
“Bu, bu, but—”
“No buts at all. You’ve got a week. Take it, and do not make me look like the asshole I probably am.”
By mid-afternoon she was on her way to Houston. Two days later she landed in Memphis, rented a car, and drove to Lucas. By week’s end she was in Boston. She shuttled to LaGuardia late Friday and took
a cab to her office at the Times. Saturday morning she met with Ed Macmillan. The next day she saw her article situated two inches below the fold of the most influential front page printed in America, the Sunday edition of the New York Times.
Killings May Be Connected to E. coli Disaster
By Isobel Gitlin
NEW YORK, Aug. 23—Law enforcement officials in three states have acknowledged the possibility that three unsolved murders may be connected to the E. coli outbreak of three years ago that left 864 people dead and thousands more sickened. Three men shot to death since June—Boston businessman Christopher Hopman, shot while on the golf course; Texas tycoon Billy MacNeal, gunned down in Houston; and Floyd Ochs, murdered in Tennessee—all have ties to a Tennessee meat-packing plant implicated as a source for the E. coli–tainted meat. Alliance Inc., where Mr. Hopman was CEO, was involved in a complicated buyout of Mr. MacNeal’s company that counted among its assets the packing plant of Knowland & Sons. Mr. Ochs was the Knowland plant manager in Lucas, Tennessee. Police officials in charge of all three cases tell the New York Times they are now actively investigating the theory that these murders could be connected.
Isobel’s story made the networks and cable news channels. Much of the old E. coli disaster tapes found new life on TV screens across the nation. She took calls from CNN, FOX, the network morning shows, PBS, and NPR. They all wanted her to tell her story on the air. Isobel refused, but did not say that her stutter was why.
There were plenty of other talking heads eager to analyze and dissect the story. The increasingly obvious fact that they knew nothing except what they’d read of Isobel’s reporting (and frequently misunderstood even that) qualified them fully for the work. In a slow news cycle their ongoing blather gave the story durable legs. In her absence from the screen, Isobel’s name was mentioned often, and was almost always praised. At Isobel’s request, the Times did not issue a photo of her, and holding that line required a good deal of bellowing from the Moose. Without having made a single appearance, Isobel Gitlin became—for no more than the allocated fifteen minutes she hoped—a media personality.
Isobel’s story and her insistence on personal privacy caused a stir at the Times. So many of the paper’s reporters fantasized about breaking a story like this one. In daydreams they saw themselves on Hardball and Crossfire or sitting next to Woodward or Bernstein at Larry King’s desk. Isobel had won the lottery, they thought, and refused to collect the prize. People who previously had nothing to say to her went out of their way to greet her. Others looked upon her, and the story of the triple murders, with more than a little skepticism. It was highly unusual for anyone’s byline to go from the obituary page to the front page overnight, and even more unusual for it to stay there. One thing particularly puzzled her: Why hadn’t other, more senior, reporters tried to muscle in, push her out? She asked Gold and the Moose told her bluntly, “They wouldn’t touch it with tongs.”
“Wh-what the hell does that mean?”
He looked at her and for a long moment tried, with his tongue, to loosen a piece of food stuck between two of his upper teeth. In that brief time Mel Gold realized he needed to protect Isobel against the reality of her chosen profession. “A lot of people think it’s bullshit,” he said with as fatherly a tone as he could muster. “The whole thing is crap, and not the kind of crap that belongs in the New York Times.”
“Oh,” said Isobel, shrugging her shoulders, a hint of a smile across her lips. “Wh-wh-what about you?” The Moose rolled his eyes and plunged the last half of a glazed doughnut into his mouth.
“If you’re worried somebody’s going to horn in and steal your story—don’t. Believe me, it’s all yours.”
“Thanks,” she said, and her smile told him she knew it was she riding the tiger and him holding the whip and chair.
She went back to Lucas to write a Sunday Times Magazine cover piece. The story played out across two pages with grainy photos of three dead men layered above an eye-catching shot of ground beef, and behind it was a black and white mural photograph of the one story, brick-sided, Knowland & Sons meat-packing plant. The article began:
Who Is Seeking Revenge?
By Isobel Gitlin
The Knowland & Sons processing plant sits on fertile flatlands next to the Smoke River, dominating the landscape as well as the economy of this small Tennessee city. According to town
fathers, pioneer hunters once roamed the Smoky Mountains’ foothills looking for deer, bear, and other commercial game, and settled in Lucas in the early 1820s. “Meat made this town,” says Ezra Combs, a city councilman with twenty-three years seniority. “Still does,” he adds with a good-natured wink. Like everyone in Lucas, Ezra knows that meat packed in this plant may have caused the deaths of 864 people and made more than seventeen thousand ill three years ago. “There’s good people living here and working hard every day at the plant,” Mr. Combs insists. “I know the folks at Knowland, known them for years. And each and every one of them is doing what’s humanly possible to find out just exactly what happened over there and make sure it don’t never happen again.”
Despite Mr. Combs’s assertion, someone, it appears, is seeking revenge. Whoever it may be is still unknown, and authorities have little to show for their efforts to identify him.
New York
Before they finished breakfast, Tom Maloney, Nathan Stein, Wes Pitts, and Louise Hollingsworth had all read Isobel Gitlin’s August 23 story in the New York Times. Pitts, who always liked being known as “football’s workaholic” and brought the same zeal to his career at Stein, Gelb, was the first one. His daily routine got him out of bed at four fifteen in the morning, shaved and showered by four thirty, and drinking tea and reading the Times, which he had messenger-delivered to his fifth floor condo on East 64th Street. At ten minutes to five, Monday through Friday, he greeted his doorman and slipped into the same limo. His driver, Laurence, a hefty black man in his early forties, was a night driver. He ferried club hoppers, pill poppers, the wealthy “wild childs,” and the idle rich too bored to go home at a reasonable hour. Pitts was always his last fare before quitting time. Laurence thought of Wesley Pitts as a man to be proud of. Laurence had driven enough rich, black athletes and entertainers to take them, one by one, as he found them. Mr. Pitts was in a class by himself. A black man, a star athlete, and now a man of real importance. He wasn’t sure what Mr. Pitts did, but he knew it had to be something really important. Why else would anyone so well off be going to work so early? Family and friends loved hearing Laurence’s stories about the big tips he often received from celebrities whose names they knew well. But no one
treated him as well as Mr. Pitts did. Twice a year, at Christmas and again at the end of June, Mr. Pitts gave him five thousand dollars. Those two envelopes with their ten thousand tax-free dollars paid most of a daughter’s private school tuition.
“Morning, Mr. Pitts,” he said. “Everything alright, sir?” The gentleman’s strange expression made Laurence apprehensive.
Half an hour before, Wesley Pitts read Isobel Gitlin’s August 23rd story in the New York Times. As the headlines and the first two paragraphs penetrated his newly-awakened mind, his stomach twisted, and for a moment Wesley thought he might lose his tea and toast. He tried desperately to regain focus. The control of the adrenaline rush that he had cultivated since high school enabled him to calm down. Fourth and goal with one second left. It always worked. Why, he wanted to know, hadn’t Pat Grath told him about Ochs yesterday, or the day before, or the day before that? They had not spoken for more than a week—perfectly unremarkable—but Grath would certainly have to call with news like this. Was he dead too? Wesley did not have Grath’s home number, nor was it listed. His cell phone did not respond.
Wesley figured that anyone able to connect Hopman, MacNeal, and Ochs would soon finger Stein and Maloney. And that would shove him, and Louise too, into the picture. What to do next? He put the odds of getting shot, right now, right here in this limo, at zero. The chances of becoming cowardly he put much higher. Wesley Pitts had built his life and two careers on a bone-deep refusal to give in, but however often he’d beaten the impulse to let the frights take over, he’d not yet outrun his dread of losing the battle. Wesley feared fear itself. He decided to go to work. Once there he’d hear what the others had to say. He told Laurence not to worry, his upset stomach would right itself soon enough.
Pitts was always the first high-echelon executive to arrive—usually by five fifteen. Occasionally one or two of the junior people on his floor would be there before him, just to be able to say “Good morning, Mr. Pitts,” hoping they were noticed and remembered. This morning the floor was empty. He unlocked his suite, passed through the small outer office where his secretary sat, and walked into what some people called the “third kingdom”: an office less splendid than Stein’s and Maloney’s, but far grander than those of even his nominal superiors. He’d have his senior partnership soon, and that would complete the picture. Sometimes he even saw himself, older by twenty years, sporting white hair, astride the mountaintop. He could never totally escape the fantasy
of his childhood friend D’Andre walking into the Chairman’s office and saying, “Ma nigga, waz up.” But not this morning. What’s up, he thought, was some crazy motherfucker trying to kill him. Hopman, then Billy Mac, and now this guy Floyd Ochs. Floyd Ochs. Pitts remembered the name well.
Maloney failed to arrive as usual at seven thirty, and Louise Hollingsworth was also a no-show. Pitts began to worry. The thought that they might be dead crossed his mind. Nathan Stein called him at seven forty-five.
“Listen, Wes,” he said, “you get up so fucking early I couldn’t get you until now.”
“What’s happening, Nathan?”
“I’m in the car. I want you to meet me. Tom and Louise are on the way too.”
“Meet you where?”
“My house in Wevertown. You know it?”
“No, I don’t. Where’s Wevertown?”
“An hour or so north of Albany. No planes, you understand? No planes, no records. Get here by car and don’t let anyone you can’t trust know you’re coming.” Nathan gave him directions that were pretty simple until the I-87 exit at Warrensburg. After that he needed to navigate the small roads, some of them unpaved, until he reached the house secluded on a small lake in the Adirondacks. “Leave now,” Stein said. “We’re only a half hour or so ahead of you.”
Pitts’s call woke Laurence from a pleasant dream. From his home in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn, Laurence opted for the Brooklyn Bridge instead of the Battery Tunnel. A stalled truck on the expressway made that a mistake. It took him almost an hour to get to Stein, Gelb’s offices. He called Mr. Pitts’s office when he was a few minutes away, and when he pulled up in front, Wesley Pitts was waiting for him, looking almost truculent, hands-on-hips, at the curb. Pitts handed the directions to Laurence, and they were away.
Nathan Stein’s mountain retreat was about what Wesley expected from any man who measured his net worth in nine figures. Tom had been there a few times before, and told Wes he never understood the attraction the place held for Nathan. Nathan hated nature and all its abundant pleasures: mountains, lakes, forests, chilly evenings, and all the rest. “What in the hell did he do here?” Wesley wondered. The property was certainly picturesque: heavily wooded with only enough cleared land for the house and a few cars. There were no paved roads nearby, and no neighbors as far as Wes could see. Maloney told Wes he remembered Nathan saying something about twenty-six acres. But for all he knew, it might be a thousand and twenty-six acres.
The house itself was built on a ridge overlooking the lake. Behind it, a path led down to the shore. A boat dock, where a rowboat and a canoe were moored, extended a few feet into the water. A large barbecue pit stood near the dock close to the water’s edge. Decks sprouted everywhere on the lakeside of the house, on all three levels. No matter where you sat you had a panoramic view of the water and the pristine, undisturbed forest encircling it on all sides. The house had seven bedrooms, each with a private bath. Four were on the first level, two were on the second level, where the main living space and the kitchen were also located, and where the three of them now congregated, and the master suite was on the third level. Trees surrounded the house so close to the building that the bedrooms on the first and second levels were always shaded. The house faced east and west, allowing a torrent of morning light to flow into the third floor master bedroom, and bathing the whole structure in the richness of the afternoon sun.
It was an exquisitely beautiful setting about which Tom and Wesley shared an unspoken agreement. Each was sure Nathan didn’t give two shits about any of it. As far as Tom knew, Nathan had bought the place, sight unseen, from a cardiothoracic surgeon flattened by divorce, anxious for immediate cash. Supposedly, Nathan’s wife, Susan, hated the place too, and they rarely went there. No surprise to Tom. Nathan and Susan had been married twenty-five years, at least, and paid little attention to one another. She raised the children and ran the household. He ran the business. That was the deal, the deal they had been born to, the deal they chose themselves. What the hell, Tom figured. He hadn’t done much better.
At one o’clock Nathan’s driver showed up with pizza. The drivers ate at the dock, where they set up a little table and played gin rummy. Laurence slept nearby on a yellow blanket. On the expansive second level deck, Louise and Wesley told Nathan what they thought in as low a key as they could manage. As he always did, Nathan demanded repetition and they complied willingly. Wesley leaned forward to avoid towering over Nathan. Louise Hollingsworth, in a director’s chair, clutched her cup of coffee, the sun catching her wiry, blonde hair. She turned toward Wes when he spoke, her hawkish profile and dry smile unable to hide her fear.
Tom Maloney was the last to arrive. He pulled into the small area cleared for parking at a quarter to two that afternoon. With three Lincoln town cars already taking up all the space, Tom squeezed his Lexus coupe in between a couple of trees. It was silly, he knew, but the drive made him crave a cheeseburger, so he stopped at the Black Bear Diner in Pottersville. Cheeseburger and a beer and Tom felt great. He was the only one of the four who drove himself, and he used traffic as his excuse for his late arrival. Nobody seemed to care one way or the other.
On the deck off the living room, the four compatriots (the term “unindicted co-conspirators” raced through Wesley’s thoughts) sat adrift in the same sinking boat. The more the others spoke, the easier it became for Louise to hold her demons at bay.
Tom examined each o
f them, concerned that the palpable fear might soon overcome them all, himself included.
“I thought this was taken care of,” Nathan said. Wes and Louise assumed he was talking to Maloney, since neither of them had any idea what Nathan referred to.
“Obviously not,” Tom said.
“Yeah, obviously not,” Nathan echoed. “Louise, what’s your assessment?”
“Hopman,” she began, well prepared after thinking of nothing else since early morning, “even Billy Mac. I can see that. The logic seems straightforward. They’re high profile, easy to identify. Their names
are all over this. But Floyd Ochs?” Louise shook her head—scared, bewildered, amazed. Maloney and Pitts were unsure. Nathan had no interest in her emotional state. He hung on every word, however. He often said, though never to her face, that Louise Hollingsworth was the best analyst he’d ever known. Her insight into companies and the people who ran them was not only more often right than wrong, it was plain spooky. She could spot a loser when he was at the very top of his game, when people proclaimed him a genius, and she could see the future success of a company when no one else could. Nathan had seen the firm make tens of millions, sometimes hundreds, by following her recommendations. He respected her opinion and now he badly needed it. Louise did not mistake hard work and promotional instincts for sorcery. She was happy to have Nathan’s favor, and fearful that her first really bad move would quickly erode it. Now, as always, she did her best and hoped to stay a step ahead of the game.
“If he knows Floyd Ochs,” she went on, “he knows everyone.”
Nathan’s eyes glistened. “Who? Who?” he demanded.
“Who’s everyone?” Pitts asked.
“Well,” Louise said. “Besides Hopman, MacNeal, and Ochs, there’s Pat Grath and us.”
The Knowland Retribution Page 13